Tag: balkan insight

Kosovo MPs to Consider Crucial Privacy Commissioner, Again

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Three times Bujar Sadiku put himself forward for the post of commissioner at Kosovo’s Information and Privacy Agency, where he serves as director. Three times the recruitment process collapsed. When it was advertised in April for a fourth time, Sadiku stood aside.

“I have tried three times,” he said. 

The post of commissioner is vital to the implementation of laws regulating access to public documents and the protection of data privacy, but it has been vacant since 2019.

The first time it was up for grabs, the competition was scrapped after the British embassy, engaged by the government to improve transparency and keep politics out of public sector recruitment, said that none of the candidates was right for the job. Two subsequent attempts failed when lawmakers were unable to bridge their political differences to endorse a candidate. 

And ordinary Kosovars are paying the price. Without a commissioner, Kosovo’s Law on Access to Public Documents and Law on the Protection of Personal Data cannot be implemented, leaving individuals unprotected from violations of their personal data privacy and journalists unable to challenge institutions which refuse to release information of public importance.

“We have an institution that has been unable to function for more than two years,” said Mexhide Demolli, executive director of the NGO FOL Movement.

All eyes on ruling Vetevendosje


Albin Kurti. Photo: BIRN/Urim Krasniqi

With the power to levy fines against offenders, the commissioner should play a key role in improving transparency in the public sector and protecting members of the public against invasions of their data privacy. But experts say the Agency is already under heavy political interference and all parties have an interest in who takes the top job. 

Once again, MPs are currently interviewing candidates for the post, before a shortlist is submitted to a parliament vote.

But it will go ahead without the oversight of the British embassy, which pulled out in August last year after the collapse of the last recruitment process.

Flutura Kusari, an expert in media law who has monitored the recruitment process, said it was of great importance that lawmakers select someone with “integrity”.

“The Commissioner should be someone who has courage and who is independent because it is dangerous if this person is controlled by politicians,” Kusari told BIRN.

“Currently, the Agency is under political control; it does not act independently, numerous opinions it has issued violate international standards of freedom of expression.”

“The failure belongs to all political parties because they failed to find consensus,” she said. “But, so far, the blame should be on those parties which held power – PDK [Democratic Party of Kosovo] and LDK [Democratic League of Kosovo]. Now we have to wait and see what Vetevendosje will do,” Kusari said, referring to the current ruling party of Prime Minister Albin Kurti.

Meanwhile, the complaints are stacking up, said Demolli.

“We have many complaints from citizens whose personal data has been violated by different companies sending promotional messages to their phones,” she told BIRN. Without a commissioner, such companies escape sanction.


Illustration. Photo: BIRN/Urim Krasniqi

Journalists frustrated

The situation is also making life difficult for journalists, who have no one to turn to if institutions do not respond to or refuse requests for access to information.

“The most frequent manner in which requests for access to public documents are rejected by institutions is via silence,” said Kastriot Berisha, a member of the Kosovo Press Council, which gathers print and online media in Kosovo, and a journalist with BIRN Kosovo.

“Currently, we address complaints to the People’s Advocate, but he can’t force institutions to provide access to public documents, only facilitate it.”

Sadiku said the delays were damaging the Agency and costing the public.

“Many complaints are pending,” Sadiku told BIRN. “Each day the Agency remains without a commissioner implies delays in addressing the complaints. Many complaints could lose all meaning if they are not addressed in time.”

Kosovo Media Criticise Call for State Regulation of Online Content

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The Press Council of Kosovo, PCK, and the Association of Journalists of Kosovo, AJK, on Wednesday voiced concern over the proposed regulation of online media content under the Law on the Independent Media Commission, IMC, deeming it a violation of “international rules of journalism”.

The IMC is an independent state body that regulates, manages, and oversees TV broadcasting in Kosovo but now it has said it wants video production on local websites added to its jurisdiction. Print media are already monitored by the PCK.

The PCK is a self-regulatory body formed by the print media in Kosovo, which is recognized by the Assembly of Kosovo through the Law on Defamation and Insult. Rulings that the PCK issues for parties and the media are “respected and valued by local courts in cases where they decide for defamation and insult”.

“Each of the media should be held accountable for their actions before state bodies, based on relevant laws, but initially no one can better assess their ethics than the media themselves, or professionals of the field,” the PCK and AJK said in a joint press release.

The reaction comes after the IMC head, Xhevat Latifi, said a new law on the IMC should include audio-visual content of websites within its auspices.

Latifi said this at a presentation of the IMC’s Annual Report for 2020 to parliament’s Committee on Local Government, Regional Development and Media on Tuesday. “We are witnessing a toxic state of media vocabulary in Kosovo,” Latifi said, justifying the initiative.

Later he told BIRN that the initiative was not his own and explained it as “concern of society”.

“I have stated that portals which deal with audio-visual production would best be included in the new law; not all portals, only these which deal with audio-visual parts. It is only a request. We are only measuring the public, their concerns. I have presented it as a concern of society, we cannot say this is my opinion or IMC position,” he said.

The Press Council and journalists’ associations deem the idea dangerous.

“Initiatives to control and evaluate ethics for print and online media by a state organisation are harmful and do not help the media and journalists,” their press release said.

Seizure Order Against Albanian News Portal Condemned

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Human rights and media freedom groups have sharply criticised a decision by a judge, Iliriana Olldashi, at Albania’s Special Court Against Corruption and Organised Crime, SPAK, to approve a prosecutorial request made last Sunday to seize any computer, mobile phone or other electronic equipment belonging to the online publication Lapsi.al.

Experts and rights organisations called it a blatant attempt to intimidate journalists in breach of their human rights and the principles of the European Court of Human Rights, ECHR.

Prosecutors launched an investigation after Lapsi.al revealed the existence of a massive database purportedly belonging to the ruling Socialist Party containing information on each voter, including background, voting history, family links or employment status.

Prosecutors ordered Lapsi.al to hand over the database but the editors refused, saying that could expose their source or sources.

“The intervention of the prosecutors and the court against Lapsi.al’s right to report on a matter of public interest is just another attempt by those in power to intimidate the media,” Flutura Kusari, a legal advisor at the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, ECPMF, told BIRN.

“Instead of investigating the breach of privacy by the Socialist Party, they are attempting to intimidate journalists and their sources,” Kusari added, saying that the decision contravenes the standards of the ECHR.

Dorjan Matlija, a human rights lawyer in Tirana, told BIRN that the court decision was based on flawed reasoning.

“The prosecutors have other possibilities to investigate the matter based on the accusations of the opposition Democratic Party against Prime Minister [Edi Rama] and other officials,” Matlija said.

He added that before approving such a request, the court should have considered the need to protect the sources, an obligation deriving from several decisions of the ECHR.

In the latest such decision, published this month, Sedletska vs Ukraine, the ECHR ruled that an order to expose a source may only be issued after all other ways to investigate a matter have been exhausted.

Matlija added that the judge’s unexpected order creates ground for further violations of media freedom and could expose more than one source of information. “The order practically could end up shutting down the media outlet [Lapsi] by seizing all its equipment,” he added.

Andi Bushati, co-owner of Lapsi, told BIRN that prosecutors had not yet acted on the court order, and that in the meantime he had appealed the decision.

He said the prosecutors seem more eager to identify their source than interview Socialist Party officials over the database. “They seem more concerned in finding out who betrayed the party and not who stole the personal data,” he said.

Kusari, from ECPMF, told BIRN that they were informing Albania’s international partners about this and related issues. “We hope that international pressure will help halt the pressure against the media,” she said.

Terrifying Twitter: Slovenia’s Marshall Twito and his ‘Fake’ Friends

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When a group of Slovenian researchers, rights advocates and investigative journalists teamed up last year to probe the activities of 27 suspicious Twitter accounts, one of them registered to Jordana Caric, ‘Joca’.

Caric, it turned out, was particularly popular with Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa, known to his critics as Marshall Twito, a nod to Josip Broz Tito, the man who ran socialist Yugoslavia for 35 years, and to Jansa’s fondness for Twitter as a means of conveying government policy and denouncing his opponents.

According to the study conducted by the institute ‘Danes je nov dan’ [Today is a New Day] and the investigative outlet ‘Pod crto’ [The Bottom Line], the “vast majority” of Caric’s Twitter posts were in praise of Jansa’s right-wing Slovenian Democratic Party, SDS, and scornful of its critics.

Between January and November last year, Jansa shared Caric’s tweets 30 times, despite the fact that, according to Danes je nov dan and Pod crto, Caric’s profile picture was lifted from a Brazilian Facebook user and the account, like the other 26, is almost certainly fake.

That the fake Caric account should enjoy such high-profile retweets is indicative of what Tadej Strok of Danes je nov dan says is the prevalence of so-called ‘astroturfing’ in Slovenia, a deceptive practice designed to create the impression of widespread grassroots support for, in this case, the SDS and the unpopularity of its opponents.

The 27 Twitter accounts – each of which used a stolen or computer-generated profile picture – “were involved in very extensive propaganda,” Strok told BIRN, “only promoting and publishing content that ideologically links to the ruling party.”

“Let’s say that the fake profile tweets something, a public figure retweets that without any critical distance… and then it is suddenly more important news and maybe it’s going to get reposted” in SDS-affiliated media.

Jansa might use the disclaimer ‘retweets are not endorsements’, but politicians like him “use fake profiles as a proxy,” said Strok, “to spread information or words that they know would put them in more trouble if they tweeted it themselves.”

“He retweets more than 100 tweets a day,” Strok said. “Of course they’re endorsements.”

Trump tactics


A mobile phone displays the suspended status of the Twitter account of former US President Donald J. Trump. Photo: EPA-EFE/MICHAEL REYNOLDS.

Marko Milosavljevic, a professor of journalism and media policy at the University of Ljubljana, says that, in a way, “Twitter has become the Official Gazette in Slovenia.”

The social media platform, used by roughly 100,000 of Slovenia’s two million people, shows “what the prime minister thinks, what he will do and what moves he will make, who are his enemies, what is his attitude towards different political actors,” Milosavljevic told BIRN.

And Jansa takes no prisoners.

In mid-March, five international media watchdogs wrote to the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, to warn of what they called Jansa’s “Trumpian style tactics” of attacking journalists on Twitter and dismissing critical reporting as “fake news”.

Sixty-two year-old Jansa, a fixture on the Slovenian political scene since independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, is currently involved in a defamation case stemming from a tweet he posted in 2016 calling two public television journalists “washed-up prostitutes”. He was given a three-month suspended prison sentence in November 2018 but a higher court ordered a retrial in 2019, which is ongoing.

Political analysts, public figures, protesters and those who challenge the government’s COVID-19 measures often find themselves the target of smear campaigns. And Jansa’s party colleagues get involved too, often with the help of fake profiles.

Danes je nov dan and Pod crto rolled out their findings in February and March this year. But it was only on February 22, when an SDS lawmaker called Alenka Jeraj inadvertently revealed her use of a fake Twitter account, that ‘astroturfing’ really hit the headlines in Slovenia.

Due to the word-limit on Twitter, Jeraj posted a comment in two parts, but posted the first under a fake account under the name ‘Kopriva’ and only the second part under her own name. Jeraj confirmed she had created the account and subsequently closed it.

It was the Kopriva scandal that prompted other media to report on the issue, said Anze Voh Bostic, an investigative journalist at Pod crto. Then came the attacks.

“What we analysed then happened to us,” Voh Bostic told BIRN. “First, attacks on Twitter, then an article in their media and then a few more tweets. It lasted maybe a week.”

Making hate speech acceptable


A street “exhibition” of PM Janez Jansa’s tweets entitled “Fits and Delusions of Marshal Twito”, launched by the Slovenian anti-govt protest movement in November, Ljubljana. Photo: Protestna ljudska skupscina.

Besides the 27 accounts deemed fake, Strok, Voh Bostic and their colleagues had also looked at online attacks against seven prominent individuals who had spoken out against Jansa’s government or his party.

They tracked down 307 accounts that participated in at least one of the attacks via tweet or retweet. Some of the accounts were most likely fake, while others belonged to senior members of the SDS, including Jansa. All of them followed at least six of the 27 fake accounts.

Such communication, from such prominent public figures, contributes to the normalisation of hate speech, said Voh Bostic, citing the example of the January 6 attack on the US Congress by supporters of then US President Donald Trump.

“In a way, Twitter is also to blame for the attack on Congress,” said Voh Bostic. “It gives some legitimacy to this kind of speech, that it’s normal.”

Voh Bostic said that one target of the attacks told him he had been harassed on the street.

“He was walking down the street and a couple of times they spat in his face,” he said. “It’s just a step away from being beaten.”

Voh Bostic said that, while the SDS, was the focus of their study, “it doesn’t mean that other parties do not use such practices”. But the ruling party is most visible and most aggressive.

According to Milosavljevic, the use of fake profiles cannot be attributed to a few over-enthusiastic party footsoldiers, but is “a systematic relationship in which many people are also paid” – the kind of system BIRN has reported previously on in Serbia.

An SDS spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

The government’s communications office, UKOM, told BIRN that via social media it “highlights and draws attention to the problem of hate speech, distinguishing between hate speech and offensive and critical speech.”

It noted what it said were “calls for death” made during anti-government protests in 2020. Some protesters adopted the slogan ‘Smrt Jansizmu’, or Death to Jansism, a play on the Yugoslav Partisan motto ‘Smrt fasizmu, sloboda narodu’, meaning Death to fascism, freedom to the people. Critics of the government say the slogan calls for the death of Jansa’s politics, not of the man.

Alone with their phones


Slovenian Prime Minister and leader of the Slovenian Democratic Party, SDS, Janez Jansa. Photo: EPA-EFE/Szilard Koszticsak HUNGARY OUT

In March, Interior Minister Ales Hojs, a member of the co-ruling New Slovenia, NSi, dodged a question on public television about why politicians use fake Twitter profiles. Instead, he complained that the government is not given enough airtime on traditional media, particularly Radio-Television Slovenia.

“The fact is that the right side of the political scene has to use social media to attract people,” Hojs said.

Milosavljevic, however, said that, while politicians try to “behave nicely” in media appearances and press conference, they feel much more freedom on social networks.

“On Twitter, they are alone with their phones and then they write what first comes to their mind, even if it is very aggressive, vulgar, offensive,” he said. As Trump demonstrated, aggressive communication garners more attention on both Twitter and within society, and so “can be effective in that regard,” Milosavljevic told BIRN.

“Unfortunately, it’s also effective in dividing that society.”

Facebook Clamps Down on Iranian Dissident ‘Troll Farm’ In Albania

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Facebook removed more than 300 Facebook and Instagram accounts belonging to members of an Iranian dissident group based in Albania that had been targeting Iran and content related to Iran.

“The network violated our policy against foreign interference which is coordinated inauthentic behavior on behalf of a foreign entity,” the social media giant said in its March report, “Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior Report”, which it published on Tuesday.

According to the report, the network now taken down was very active in 2017 and in the second half of 2020.

“The people behind this activity relied on a combination of authentic and fake accounts to post MEK-related content and comment on their own and other people’s posts, including those of international news organizations like Radio Liberty, Voice of America and BBC,” said the report.

The People’s Mujahedin of Iran, MEK, is an Iranian opposition group many of whose members moved to Albania in 2013 on the advice of the US. They live mainly in a camp on the outskirts of the capital Tirana.

Facebook added that it will continue to monitor any attempts to re-establish the network by people behind this campaign.

“The operation relied heavily on fake accounts to post and amplify its messages. Some of these accounts went through repeated name changes. Other accounts used the names of deceased members of MEK. Some claimed to be located in Iran but were operated from Albania. All the accounts were overt in their support of MEK and their criticism of the Iranian government,” the report continued.

Some of the fake accounts were a decade old but most of them were created between 2014 and 2016. They were particularly active in 2017, reduced activity in 2018–2019 and resumed in 2020.

Veteran Reporter Accuses Croatian Broadcaster of Revenge Sacking

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The Croatian public broadcaster, HRT, confirmed on Tuesday that it had again sacked Hrvoje Zovko, a veteran reporter and president of the Croatian Journalists’ Association, HND, for violent behaviour in the workplace. Zovko did not receive an official notice terminating his employment.

“At this stage, we do not know what is written [in the termination notice]. He only received information about the decision from a journalist who called him and said he had been fired and asked for a statement,” his lawyer, Vanja Juric, told BIRN.

It was “quite clear that this is a continuation of [HRT’s] abuse against him that has been going on since 2018,” Juric continued.

HRT told HINA press agency that it had initiated dismissal procedures following “an anonymous report stating the inappropriate and unprofessional behaviour of Hrvoje Zovko towards one worker, a [woman] journalist, at work”.

Zovko on Tuesday denied all wrongdoing: “History repeats itself, not only through the fact that I continue to be abused by the same false accusations as three years ago but also in the fact that, like last time, the whole public was informed of my dismissal before I was.”

HRT sacked Zovko as a journalist and editor in September 2018, citing a “series of insults, misconduct, extremely inappropriate and unprofessional statements”.

It was referring to a quarrel between him and Katarina Perisa Cakarun, editor of HRT’s Information Media Service, which erupted after Zovko announced he would resign as executive editor of the HRT4 channel.

HND said then that it was convinced that the procedure and HRT’s decision would not have happened had Zovko not been the HND President.

Zovko had annoyed his bosses by speaking out about the state of media freedom in Croatia and alleging censorship at HRT. The broadcaster later sued Zovko for damages, seeking 33,300 euros in compensation.

HRT told BIRN on that occasion that it had to seek legal redress because Zovko and others “untruthfully claimed that there is censorship within HRT, though they know that none exists”.

After Zovko initiated a procedure against HRT following his 2018 dismissal, the Zagreb Municipal Labour Court ruled in 2019 that Zovko had been fired unlawfully. In August last year, the Rijeka County Court has upheld the 2019 ruling. In November last year, a court threw out a lawsuit ordering HRT to compensate Zovko for litigation costs of 2,580 euros.

Zovko returned to television after the court ruling, but now HRT has initiated a new procedure against him with similar accusations.

The Ministry of Culture and Media, commenting on his dismissal, said it condemned all forms of violence and abuse and advocated clearer procedures and equal treatment in all cases of suspected violence while adding that everyone must have the right to present a defence.

Zovko insists the accusations are untrue and that “from the behaviour of HRT, it is clear that it is not about the violations of my employment obligations, but about their desire for revenge”.

In January, the weekly Nacional published a story about the alleged sexual harassment of a journalist by the HRT Business Director – but HRT said it had checked the claims and “established that the allegations were unfounded”.

Both the HND and the Trade Union of Croatian Journalists, SNH, have said such investigations should be more serious. The SNH president and an HRT reporter, Maja Sever, said they had asked HRT to establish an anonymous reporting system that protects the victim – but the call was rejected.

Serbian Pro-Govt Media’s ‘Shameless’ Campaign Against KRIK Condemned

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The Stockholm-based international human rights organisation, Civil Rights Defenders, has condemned what it called “the shameless campaign of the Serbian pro-government tabloid media” against a Serbian investigative media portal, Crime and Corruption Reporting Network, KRIK.

The rights organisation – and independent Serbian media unions – reacted after Pink TV and two pro-government tabloids, Kurir and Alo, published closely coordinated stories linking KRIK to a notorious underworld gangster, Veljko Belivuk.

Belivuk is a leader of a criminal and hooligan group once called the “Janjicari” (“Janissaries”) many of whose members were recently arrested on suspicion of murder, extortion, kidnapping and drug dealing.

Allegations about KRIK’s connections with members of the gang were first published by the pro-government TV station Pink on Tuesday evening.

The next day, Kurir published photos of KRIK editor Stevan Dojcinovic alongside those of Belivuk on its front page with the headline, “Secret deal between KRIK and Belivuk”. Alo then published the same story with a front-page headline reading, “KRIK – Belivuk’s private media!”

In reality, for some years KRIK and some other independent investigative media were the only ones in Serbia to publish stories on the gang and its ties with the Serbian government and the ruling Serbian Progressive Party.

The gang’s connections to state officials, including a former high-ranking police official and the current general secretary of the Progressive-led government, are well-documented.

Some members of the group formed part of the security detail at President Aleksandar Vucic’s inauguration in 2017, where they were caught on camera manhandling journalists.

Vucic’s 23- year-old son, Danilo, was photographed several times with various members of the Janjicari. A KRIK journalist, Bojana Pavlovic, had her phone snatched away, to which police did not intervene, after she pictured the President’s son with members of the gang in June 2020.

However, after the arrest of Belivuk’s group in February this year, pro-government tabloids started publishing hostile stories about the Janjicari along with material leaked from the police investigation.

Zeljko Bodrozic, president of the Independent Association of Journalists of Serbia, NUNS, said on Wednesday that the pro-government media had “initiated a very dangerous action of connecting independent and professional journalists with the criminal group of Veljko Belivuk in order to remove responsibility from state officials for the emergence, strengthening and atrocities of this and other criminal groups.”

“The reports of Pink TV and regime tabloids about connections between KRIK and Belivuk are meaningless constructions, and no one who follows the public scene and the work of the KRIK editorial office can believe these untruths.

“But the big problem is that only a large number of citizens have access to the media that spread and spread these heinous lies, which is why the safety of our brave colleagues who have been writing about corruption and crime for years is now dangerously endangered,” Bodrozic added.

KRIK is a non-profit organisation founded by a team of journalists who for years have been engaged in exposing crime and corruption and have received many awards for their work. It is part of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, OCCRP, an international non-profit organisation that is a consortium of investigative centers and independent media in 20 countries around the world.

Turkish Media Overseer Keeps Critical TV Station’s Screens Blank

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Turkey’s Radio and Television Supreme Council, RTUK, the state agency that monitors, regulates and sanctions radio and television broadcasts, has blocked the launch of a critical TV station for more than a year.

Sozcu, one of Turkey’s most read daily newspapers, bought the local TV station over a year ago and made all the preparations necessary for the start of nationwide broadcasting.

But RTUK has stopped the launch of Sozcu TV in its tracks, by not accepting its application for a change of logo, Sozcu said on Thursday.

“Sozcu TV bought SRT TV channel from Mega Agency and Advertisement Company on February 21, 2020, which was broadcasting nationwide with the central satellite system in Sivas. However, the RTUK has unconstitutionally not put Sozcu TV’s application for a logo change on its agenda,” Sozcu explained.

Sozcu said that it first applied for a logo change on February 27 2020. “Sozcu applied to change the TV channel’s logo from ‘Sivas SRT’ to ‘SZC’ but the RTUK did not answer. After we at Sozcu daily newspaper made this public … RTUK overruled the application and fined Sozcu, saying Sivas SRT’s logo was being misused as ‘SRT Sivas,’” Sozcu added.

Since then, Sozcu says it has applied four more times to RTUK, which has still not given an answer. The RTUK is constitutionally obliged to answer such applications from between eight to 10 days.

Observers say that, in recent years, RTUK has become a tool of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government to put pressure on remaining independent media in the country.

A recent report from the Journalists’ Association of Turkey said that between July and September 2020 alone, RTUK issued 90 penalties against independent media outlets, including halts to broadcasting and administrative fines.

On February 10, RTUK again fined KRT TV, Fox TV, Halk TV and Tele 1, all of which are seen as critical of the authorities for different reasons.

While the Turkish government, via RTUK, stops the launch of more unwelcome critical TV stations, existing TV stations have suffered from increased political pressure.

Olay TV, which hired many well-known senior journalists after a Turkish businessman bought the channel last summer, was closed down in December 2020, only two months after its launch.

The owner said the station had been unable to withstand the political pressure, and its editors had failed to find a new owner.

The Human Rights Watchdog Freedom House listed Turkey as not free in 2020. The World Press Freedom Index, of another watchdog, Reporters Without Borders, ranks Turkey in 154th place among 180 countries in terms of press freedom.

Turkey Detains 39 for ‘Terrorist Propaganda’ Social Media Posts

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The Turkish Interior Ministry announced on Tuesday that security forces detained 39 social media users in the first week of February for allegedly posting propaganda for terrorist organisations online.

It said that a total of 575 offenders have been detected and that detentions continue.

“Debates and developments on social media platforms as well as the social media accounts of illegal groups and structures are being followed closely,” the ministry said in a written statement.

The detainees are accused of propaganda for organisations which Turkey accepted as terrorist organisations, including the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, PKK, the so-called Islamic State, extremist leftist groups and the so-called Fethullahist Terrorist Organisation – a name Turkey uses to brand followers of exiled Turkish preacher Fethullah Gulen, who Ankara accuses of orchestrating a failed coup attempt in 2016.

The 39 detainees include several students who allegedly run social media accounts to organise the recent series of high-profile protests against the political appointment of a new rector at the prestigious Bogazici University in Istanbul.

Riot police staged a major operation to disperse the student protesters last week, with hundreds detained and dozens charged.

Aysen Sahin, an independent Turkish journalist, was also detained by police at her home on Monday evening for posting a message on Twitter during last week’s student protests.

Sahin was detained after some pro-government newspapers criticised her. She was released on Tuesday morning.

The Turkish government’s crackdown on social media users intensified after it introduced a new law on digital media last year.

The new law allows security forces to detain anyone responsible for suspicious posts which are linked to terrorist organisations or any kind of disinformation.

As part of the new law, social media platforms are forced to appoint legal representatives in the country to answer the government’s demands to delete social media posts and close accounts.

YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Russia’s VK social media platform decided to appoint representatives after Turkish government fined them twice. Twitter, however, is still resisting the Turkish government’s new regulations.

According to the Turkish Interior Ministry, 14,186 social media accounts were investigated and 6,743 people were tried because of their posts on social media in first eight months of 2020.

Poland Pushes Law to Limit ‘Censorship’ by Internet Giants

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Polish Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro announced on December 17 the government has prepared a draft law on the protection of freedom of speech online, arguing that, “There cannot be any censorship of the freedom of speech – freedom of speech and debate is the essence of democracy.”

The issue of online censorship has gained traction over the last few days after the biggest global social media platforms removed or suspended the accounts of US President Donald Trump as a consequence of his using those platforms to mobilise supporters to challenge the legitimate result of the presidential election and march on the Capitol on January 6, which ended with five fatalities. The restrictions have caused controversy around the world, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel describing Trump’s ban from Twitter as “problematic”.

On Tuesday, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki appeared to jump on the bandwagon by condemning the unbridled power of the internet giants. “The censorship of freedom of speech, the domain of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, is returning today in the form of a new, commercial mechanism fighting against those who think differently,” Morawiecki wrote in a Facebook post on January 12.

The Polish government’s condemnation of the events in Washington has been softer than that of other EU states, with President Andrzej Duda calling them “an internal matter for the United States”.

According to Poland’s Ministry of Justice, the draft law will state that social media companies cannot remove posts or block accounts unless the content is in breach of Polish law. If that happens, the new law states that users will have the right to file a complaint with the social media company, which will then have 48 hours to deal with the request.

The possibility to then appeal the decision of the social media companies before a newly created special court – the Court Defending the Freedom of Speech – will also be introduced.

Digital rights groups active in Poland stress that it is premature to comment on the contents of the Polish draft law before it is made public.

“Media accounts speak about some solutions to address the problem of the so-called private censorship – the redundant, arbitrary removal of content by social media platforms – and about facilitating access to the justice system in case of conflicts with global internet companies,” Dorota Glowacka, from the digital rights group Panoptykon, told BIRN. “The EU draft regulation Digital Services Act announced in December is going in the same direction and generally we consider this direction to be correct.”

The Polish draft law was introduced to the public just two days after the European Commission presented its proposals for two continent-wide regulation packages: the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act, both of which introduce new rules for internet giants operating in the EU.

The proposed Digital Services Act – if approved – would require platforms to do more to limit the spread of illegal content, while at the same time regulate the manner in which internet platforms can block users or remove content. A decision to ban or block content or a user would have to be made in a more transparent manner, thereby reducing arbitrariness. The platforms will also have to inform users about the reasons for the ban and users will have the ability to present counter-arguments. An independent system of supervision over the final decisions of the platforms will also be introduced.

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